This is Game 3 of our campaign. Check the Haywire tag for more.

Game 3 of our campaign is Operation Oracle—a Retaliation Op. In Haywire’s Tour of Duty campaign, these are triggered operations that occur when their conditions are met. Operation Oracle occurs when you’ve collected two Intel Points, the currency that brings your campaign closer to its conclusion. You can choose to skip it, but you’ll take a penalty on future missions for doing so. In the case of Operation Oracle, that would cause civilians on the board to potentially spot me and report me to the enemy. That’s… real bad. So we’re not skipping it.

The author of this book is not a native English speaker, so the word choice is occasionally a bit too casual or oddly chosen. I feel as if Modiphius could have contributed better editing, but they clearly didn’t. Notably, the above description also cuts off the conditions for this mission… which are different between this table and the campaign chapter. Suffice it to say the table is clearly wrong. Another simple editing note that should have been caught for the price that this ruleset sells for.

Moving on… this mission sees us defending a construction site for a schoolhouse. I looked over my terrain collection and decided I would have the battle take place near the garages and storage buildings. I lack anything that resembles a build under construction and didn’t want to print new pieces. So here we are:

The asphalt tiles are new and actually really easy. I made a simple concrete pattern in PowerPoint and printed it off on normal paper. I then used a glue stick to stick it down to simple 8×6″ MDF sheets. I’ve used these previously to base terrain and they warped rather easily, but it hit me that a glue stick and a bit of normal paper would be unlikely to warp. Sure enough I now find myself with a simple solution for asphalt tiles that can cover a large area quickly. Rad.

Anyway, this is a wave defense mission. There’s not a lot to really discuss, if we’re being honest. My son and I took up defensive positions…

And shot a lot of bad guys that kept deploying in unfortunate positions—mostly due to their sheer quantity.

The first four to five turns were honestly just a shooting gallery. A Fog of War card did deploy an enemy model who pegged one of my guys with a grenade, but it was mostly just a dice rolling exercise, as you’d expect. Wave defense only really becomes interesting when things start to go very wrong. Graciously, they did.

We rolled the maximum number of models possible three turns in a row. It was… uh… rough. Fifteen enemy models per turn, which we swiftly and repeatedly mowed down through a combination of grenades, heavy gunfire, and at least one support use.

We made it out, but I was left with two men with level 1 injuries and one man with level 2 injuries. Our medical bay can only treat one person at a time (until it get further upgrades). After two missions with no injuries, this was a pretty harsh blow. I’m down to three models on my team to my son’s six. I’ll be borrowing a rifleman for our next mission.

The mission itself was fine as a change of pace. I would be loathe to run another “Kill all the bad guys” mission right away, but after a perfectly executed quiet mission, I can accept a bit of intense gunfire.

The worst part is that, as best as I can tell, as a Retaliation Operation, we don’t get any rewards unless it explicitly states one. Ouch.

Our next mission will be Operation Midnight Fury:

Depending on how we insert, this should be a solid change of pace. Get in, setup, quickly blow the emplacements, then get the heck out. I’m printing off mortars I plan on quickly painting up for this. I’m rather enjoying how Haywire is making me slowly expand my moderns collection. It’s almost a bonus bit of fun to me. I’ve gotten a lot of scatter done—heck, the chain link fences on this board are also brand new!

Our mission continues. I hope to get on game a week done until we finish out the campaign. They play pretty fast, so this seems eminently doable. This next mission will also push us out of the first third of the campaign and into the second third, where we roll on a more dangerous mission chart.

I’m looking forward to it. Losing men to injury sucks, but it makes for compelling TV, right?